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Stiles loses it when his mom dies, only 12 and already on the edge, guilty and angry, drowning in a whole ocean of grief, so fucking furious at the excruciating relief that his mom is gone, that the stranger living in her body can’t scream at him anymore.
His mom is gone.
After the fourth fight he picks with another kid bigger than him, taller and stronger, and landing in the principal’s office with a bloody nose and split knuckles, a bruise blooming on his jaw, his dad drives him home.
“Hell, Stiles.” There are bags under the Sheriff’s bloodshot eyes; new lines in his forehead and a swath of gray at his temples that wasn’t there a year ago. “Kid, you’ve gotta stop doing this.”
And, quieter: “I don’t know what to do with you.”
It turns out, one of his deputies does. Hanrahan comes over the next weekend to pick Stiles up in his beat-up black Samurai, drives him down to a warehouse on the edge of the industrial district, and buys him his first pair of boxing gloves.
He loves it. His training starts off slow and clumsy, and he has to learn how to take a punch – the right way, his coach tells him, not this bass-ackwards cowboy way he’s been doing. He has to be able to keep fighting after.
The old man looks like ten miles of hard road, weatherbeaten and sharp, and a nose that’s been broken so many times it’s lost its shape. He runs Stiles through drill after drill, hit after hit, spar after spar – wailing on pads and punching bags and nothing but air until the combinations are second nature. Stiles has a mean hook, but it’s his uppercut that’s the knockout, sure and quick.
It feels good, to go home sore, to sleep it off, to wake up and recover with giant breakfasts and protein shakes, trying not to reopen his split lip. It feels good to focus, to forget. It feels fucking good to hit something and better to hit someone, and that never goes away, as he shoots from bantam flyweight to junior welterweight to middleweight, taller and broader, muscled, stronger.
He sends up a small prayer of thanks to Hanrahan, long moved on from Beacon Hills, when Scott gets bitten and his training turns out to have immediate, vital real life applications.
The next year, when he’s back to boxing, when they’ve waited months for a threat that doesn’t come and have settled back into whatever passes for normal, now, Stiles gets a new passbook and heads back into the ring. His first match is a narrow win against a guy with regional ranking and a permanent scowl. It’s strange to be back, knowing what it’s like to fight for his life and the lives of the people he loves, knowing that the stakes are so much lower: a bruise, a belt, points and pride.
He sighs and stretches, feeling out sore muscles, the tender places where he took hits, adjusts the frozen peas draped across his cheekbone where the other kid landed a lucky right cross. It’s already a mottled, splotchy dark red, fixing up to be a gruesome bruise.
“You can come in,” he says quietly, eyes closed as he eases back in his chair with a low sigh.
The window opens, and Stiles can hear Derek swing himself through, step closer, floorboards creaking under his stupid leather boots. They’re shitty shoes for running around in a forest.
Derek’s fingers settle on the bruise on his cheek, and some of the pain melts way. “You’re hurt.”
“Yeah, well.” Stiles relaxes into the relief, into Derek’s touch, just a little. “I’m a fighter.”
“Yeah, you are,” Derek says.